Dell Medical School – Research for Health

The Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin will improve health in Travis County and throughout the country by training new physicians, providing treatment in a new teaching hospital and other clinical venues, and conducting research to expand knowledge of medicine and medical technology.

Truly a community initiative, the medical school is becoming a reality as part of a visionary partnership with Seton Healthcare Family and Central Health, the county’s public health care district.

Johnston is currently associate vice chancellor of research at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a practicing neurologist who specializes in preventing and treating stroke. He will begin March 1 at the Dell Medical School, which plans to welcome its first class of students in fall 2016.

“There is no greater opportunity for improving health care than by building a medical school from the ground up at a top institution like UT and in an entrepreneurial city like Austin. With a deeply committed community, it’s remarkable Austin hasn’t had a medical school until now. The opening of Dell Medical School gives the city the chance to approach medical education differently and more effectively than ever before,” Johnston said during his press conference on January 21, 2014.

The data-intensive computing power of the Stampede supercomputer at UT’s Texas Advanced Computer Center allows scientists to accelerate research in such areas as brain tumor imaging, the treatment of cancer and DNA repair — and that's just for starters.

Dell Medical School will have access to this same supercomputing strength, which is already helping researchers make major medical breakthroughs here and across the country.

Opened in 2010, the Dell Pediatric Research Institute will be a cornerstone of the new medical school, folding in the institute’s charge to study childhood obesity, cancer, birth defects, brain injury, nutrition, epilepsy and autism.

Researchers across UT Austin are already engaged in unlocking the secrets of the brain – from addiction research in the School of Pharmacy to neuroimaging techniques and the exploration of brain function at the Imaging Research Center and Alzheimer’s research at the Center for Learning and Memory.

The university’s Institute for Neuroscience is home to more than 70 neuroscience related faculty members who represent all major disciplines and techniques in neuroscience including molecular, physiology, cellular and systems research, cognition, behavior, and the neurobiology of disease. The institute already offers a MD/Ph.D. program through UT Medical Branch.

CLICK HERE for video from the Dell Medical School Forum on October 29, 2013.

CLICK HERE for excerpts from Dr. Johnston's press conference on January 21, 2014.